Stalled efforts to supply energy into the local grid highlight the changing relationship between miners and the power they need.
Power supplied to Northern Star Resources’ Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines will soon come from a renewable resource adjacent to the town from which it takes its name.
By the middle of 2027, commissioning will start on a new source of energy to fuel the region’s most prolific mine for decades to come.
Zenith Energy is in the throes of planning a renewably fed power facility that will revolutionise the supply into Northern Star’s KCGM operation, moving it away from the South West Interconnected System (SWIS) and the ageing, dual-fuel Parkeston power station of which it is a part-owner alongside TransAlta.
Once complete, Zenith’s Eastern Goldfields Power project will comprise 256 megawatts of wind generation, 138MW megawatts of solar generation and 138MW/300MW hours of battery energy storage.
Zenith’s new project will sit just 10 kilometres outside of Kalgoorlie, feature some of the largest wind turbines in Australia – 150 metres high with a rotor diameter of 182 metres – and will be supported by a back-up thermal generation plant.
Northern Star will buy energy from the renewable project under a powerpurchase agreement for 25 years, while taking a stake as a joint venture partner in the thermal project.
The development is likely to garner plenty of interest in a city where awareness of the need for energy supply and security have reached new heights in recent years.
“The KCGM project provides a blueprint for what modern mining energy systems should look like: cost-effective, clean, scalable, reliable and delivery of real benefits to local and regional communities,” Zenith managing director Hamish Moffatt said following the announcement late last year.
The project will clearly deliver in terms of local jobs and supply chain engagement.
But the desire to bring electricity benefit beyond the mine gate has come to little so far.
SWIS support
The SWIS is the main source of power for the town of Kalgoorlie, KCGM, and a number of other prolific mining and processing projects in the Goldfields.
It connects Kalgoorlie to the state’s South West through to Dongara, via a single 655km transmission line that has stood since 1984.
The reliability of that line is a source of frustration for some industrial operators, most vocally Lynas Rare Earths, which blamed the network for production downgrades in November last year.
It also powers residential homes and businesses in Kalgoorlie and surrounds, and its fragility was highlighted when it was knocked out by a freak storm in January 2024.
The state government is planning to build a $150 million vanadium redox flow battery in Kalgoorlie and is considering construction partners ahead of an operational target of 2029.
The state insists the battery will be built with Western Australian vanadium, a material not currently mined in the state.
ASX-listed Australian Vanadium appears to be the likely feed source for vanadium material as it progresses its namesake project north of Cue, despite having yet to take a final investment decision there.
At time of writing, stage-two tenders for the battery project were open, with AVL among the bidders pitching to build the battery as well as supply the material.
The government also has plans for a Goldfields regional network: a common-use transmission project it says will link renewable energy resources in the region to industrial centres and local communities.
Early studies into the network have assumed the regional network will not be operational until 2033.
In the meantime, concerns linger over the state of Kalgoorlie’s power network; an issue Northern Star sought to address when planning its new power solution.
In January, documents submitted to the Environmental Protection Authority revealed Northern Star had hoped to plug its new thermal plant back into the SWIS as a source of electricity supply to support the network.
That proposal has been knocked back.
Under current plans, the thermal power station would be built on tenure granted under the Mining Act, leaving its proponents – Northern Star and Zenith – subject to a different set of rules than if they were to build the plant outside a mining project.
“[The Department of Mines, Petroleum and Exploration] has expressed the view that Mining Act tenure should be used exclusively for mining purpose and not for the export of electricity to the grid,” Northern Star wrote in its EPA submission.
“While the proposed power station and associated assets are proposed on Mining Act tenure, the facility will not export electricity to the South West Interconnected System until the state formally endorses a tenure and approvals pathway that expressly permits such exports.”
Projects built under the Mining Act have lower cost and regulatory burdens compared with those built under the Land Administration Act, which the government prefers as a pathway to energy development.
It is a similar regulatory hurdle to that faced by Fortescue in the Pilbara, where the Andrew Forrest-led miner hopes to supply excess energy from its growing renewable energy network – built on Mining Act tenure to power mines – to data centres.
While the new energy system will keep Northern Star from drawing as heavily on the constrained Kalgoorlie SWIS network, it will also prevent the goldminer from giving back to it.
In June, WA opposition energy spokesperson Steve Thomas told Business News the state had not fully shut the door on miners feeding excess power into common-user grids, but voiced concern over the precedent that would be set if they were allowed to.
“The issue is simply that renewable energy development is not mining,” Mr Thomas said.
“You start to establish precedents [whereby] renewable energy is coming under the Mining Act, but it’s not mining, so what else might ultimately come under the Mining Act that is not mining?”
The legality of feeding non-mining infrastructure with energy projects on Mining Act tenure is a grey area.
As the nature of mining power supply changes, particularly in areas where grid supply is constrained, like the Goldfields, it is a question that will continue to be asked.
Renewables boom
The mix of sun, wind, vast expanses and isolation from major energy networks beyond the fringes of the SWIS make the Goldfields particularly suited to renewable projects.
Zenith’s plans on the outskirts of Kalgoorlie are the headline act in a suite of renewable energy activations across the Goldfields in recent years.
Among the proponents to go the renewables path in the region are Gold Fields and Lynas Rare Earths, while newer market entrants such as Liontown Resources and Bellevue Gold have had the benefit of building out lower carbon energy from scratch.
Bellevue and Lynas are both run on energy produced by Zenith.
And while Gina Rinehart-backed Lynas floated the potential of leaning more on diesel generators as a standby source of energy when its SWIS connection doesn’t hold up, the company has also benefited strongly from the 65MW hybrid renewable power station at Mt Weld.
Between the March quarter of 2025, when it was relying on a diesel plant, and the same quarter this year with the new facility in place, Lynas used 870,000 fewer litres of diesel at Mt Weld.
As geopolitical ruptures in the Middle East drove the price of diesel to record highs, that was a significant boost.
The rare earths producer’s power station, also built, owned and operated by Zenith under a 15-year power purchase agreement, comprises 24MW of wind, 7MW of solar and 12MW of battery storage, along with a 17MW gas-fired station and 5MW of diesel on standby.
As recently as last year, Lynas leadership vented over the challenges of accessing reliable and affordable power when competing in a market dominated by China.
As a participant in Western Power’s Eastern Goldfields Load Permissive Scheme, it is autonomously supplied grid power when available and turned down when demand is high elsewhere.
The rollout of renewables appears to have boosted Lynas’s power position greatly.
South African goldminer Gold Fields was one of the earliest movers on renewables at its mine sites in the region.
Gold Fields’ Granny Smith mine is powered by a hybrid solar and battery microgrid, delivered in 2020 by Aggreko and expanded with an increase in renewables starting in 2025.
The Granny Smith renewables system supplies about 21 per cent of the mine’s power needs.
Gold Fields’ Agnew mine has been fuelled by a hybrid renewable microgrid built by EDL since 2020, which was the first project in the country to fuel a mine site with large-scale wind generation.
Its St Ives project will be the beneficiary of a $296 million renewables project from this year, currently being built by Pacific Energy.
The project will draw energy from a 35MW solar farm and 42MW of wind power and is expected to supply more than 70 per cent of St Ives’ power once commissioned.
Gold Fields expects it to slash the mine’s carbon emissions by 50 per cent once commercial operation starts in the second half of this year.
The miner has not closed the door on further renewables expansion across its suite of projects in the area, according to Granny Smith general manager Mark Glazebrook late last year.
“Goldfields and Granny Smith are always looking at opportunities to expand our renewables,” he said on a site visit in November.
“Obviously, we have to look at it from both a sustainability context as well as a cost context.
“There are definitely opportunities for further expansion of the renewables in terms of solar farm and potentially wind turbines into the future.”
Queensland-based remote energy specialist EDL built the system supporting Gold Fields’ Agnew mine as a first mover in the space.
Speaking with Business News last year, chief executive James Harman said there was a global shift by companies operating on grid fringes nationally in finding their own power solutions, including those that had historically drawn from the SWIS at Kalgoorlie.
“There’s a common thread, and that is that a lot of industry is concerned about reliability, and so are we,” he said.
“We are looking at lots of fringe-of-grid opportunities, where we are able to design wind, solar, battery solutions for a customer and then firm it from the grid.
“That is something we’re working on here in WA. We’ve got a project that we’re very advanced with as well, in Far North Queensland.
“I think we’ll see a lot more of that, instead of industry relying on the grid to supply largely renewable power.
“We can build microgrids that connect to the grid, as fringe of grid for that backup if needed, but we’re able to design the wind-solar-battery component as a microgrid and provide fraction renewables.”
- From the recent Business News Goldfields-Esperance publication released in June.
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